Nocturne
by Akazukin Elle
Summary: Today, instead, someone stands with his hands over her ears and eyes, and lets her forget the fury of the weather of her heart.


NOCTURNE  
by Akazukin Elle

Were she anyone but the girl she'd become, she thinks the guilt would be insurmountable. In the silence, she reviews the shame she has survived before, and in its face this is small, barely recognizable as guilt at all.

Tinga. Zack. Eva. Ben. Bryn. Five of her brothers and sisters shot down, killed in the course of duty, missing in action forever and ever; one without his memory, one with blank dark eyes, and three lying deep and deaf underground, the ghosts who haunt her nightmares every so often, a reminder of the things that she has had to do, has failed to achieve. The flaw in her blood, practically the only thing she cannot do: She will never raise the dead. 

There's a whole gallery of faces that linger when she thinks of guilt, of shame, of failure: They are the ones she thinks of when she goes to funerals, when she reads about amnesia in the newspaper, when she watches the rising anti-transgenic hysteria from the rooftops and wonders if she will ever get a rest from the chaos that is Seattle, 2022.

Compared to the snap of Ben's neck in her hands -- Tinga's body so water-heavy in her lap -- Eva's scared eyes, the bullet in her chest -- this is nothing. It is an obstacle she has no difficulty overcoming, something she is able to shrug off with a flippant comment.

It is just one of those hundred thousand little shames she'll carry around for the rest of her life, on par with the lies she whispered to Kendra, O.C., Sketchy, all those people she ripped off, the ones she didn't save. Ben would have called them sins of omission, hot and dark but not ones that leave permanent marks: Little stains that are all but invisible on the fabric of her life, scrubbed away by time and new ones, easily forgotten.

Max knows the expression Logan would try to hide from her if he ever found out: Wounded, hurt, the surprised-but-unsurprised twist of his bitter lips harsh in judgment of her sins. He would look at her, let his eyes linger on her breasts, her navel, her hips, wondering the many ways she has been touched, been pretend-loved, by someone who is not Logan Cale. She knows he would smile tightly at her and say he understood; she also knows he would never, ever understand that she knows what she needs is what he cannot give; what she cannot take. He is a true romantic; she is more pragmatic. A realist.

That fundamental difference has caused so much grief between them that now, with the virus, the gulf seems insurmountable, roaring deep the storm of their love, their story, into the air. She stands on her own side, and today cannot see him looking back.

Today, instead, someone stands with his hands over her ears and eyes, and lets her forget the fury of the weather of her heart.

"Move over," Alec says, "you're hogging the bed." And his hand is tangled in her hair as he says it, voice warm with afterglow and -- she thinks -- true affection. He doesn't love her, nor she him: But they are more alike than not, and finding comfort in this wasteland is rare. She feels him prod her side with tender fingers, then trace the mild bruises there. Not an apology -- with him, never an apology -- but rather a strange kind of wonder at the fast-fading grey-purple in handprint shapes that are scattered over her torso, mingling with the Sandeman runes, colouring them pretty. _I did this?_ his hands say, in his low lazy voice, and her body, ticklish, answers, _Of course_.

She rolls over onto her stomach, lets him drape an arm over her back; relishes the human contact for what it is and closes her eyes. "You're a jerk," she mutters into the pillow, but her voice is without the heat in her cheeks, mellow, satisfied. She is loose and calm. Safe, and oh God she needs the safety, which he gives her willingly: A palm at the small of her back, now, and earlier gentleness, neediness that she wouldn't have thought he'd ever let on.

Nothing with Logan is ever safe. Not before, with Lydecker on her ass half the time and the Reds and that bitch Renfro the other half; not now, when her skin is poison, steeped with his death, the guilt of loving him too much. With Alec, it's the opposite, perhaps because what they have is convenience, a kind of trench camaraderie that extends to the bed.

"This we know," he says, and she wonders why she likes him using 'we' so much, wonders if, after all is said and done, she will seek out a unit wherever she goes. There's the Manticore training again, hard and fast in her blood, shifting the words on her skin into something readable, something hard, something real. Logan had his poet's hands, his crusades, his causes, the broad sweep of his shoulders, and those were all things that made her hurt with wanting for a cell she could not -- would not -- create.

"I figure I should remind you once in a while. Keeps you honest." She props herself up on one elbow to look at him, the delicate planes of his face, the cheekbones to die for, the eyelids that she has kissed more than once just to feel the long fine eyelashes against her lips; he is beautiful, a real Manticore golden boy. She wonders if he was made with anyone in mind, if he was inspired by anyone's husband, anyone's son, to look the way he does, spattered with freckles and dark humour. "If that's even possible."

He shrugs. "Probably not," he replies, kissing her shoulder-blade, running a finger up her spine. She thinks it must be the cat DNA that makes her arch and practically purr. Alec's good at what he does. He looks at her for a long moment, and she feels judged, as she often does with Alec: For him, she is an imperfect soldier, incapable of being callous enough, strong enough to weather what her life will always bring.

It's funny, but she prefers to be seen that way, a flawed warrior; to Logan, she is an imperfect woman, unable even to touch his face, to give him comfort, to take comfort when it is offered. He is reluctant with Max-the-soldier, sharp, sarcastic, uncertain, unsteady when she does what she does. It makes her feel like she imagines an old woman must feel: Useless, shapeless, and wrinkled, folding in on herself gracelessly, falling prey to age. She prefers to fail as a fighter than as a human being. It is easier to know that you're not very good at following command, even if your combat skills are top-notch; easier than knowing that love is both with you and beyond you forever.

That's what it's come down to.

_Forever._

"You're thinking again," Alec drawls. "It's unattractive."

"Screw you," she replies absently; he kisses her forehead and rolls out of bed to shower. She watches him pad across the dirty floor, rolling his shoulders smugly, and is struck by the proportions of his body, the sheer technical brilliance of it. Someone, somewhere must have loved him. She doesn't, but it seems impossible that he has gone through his whole life without being loved. He seems too perfect, too self-aware, for that.

Sometimes she follows him to the closet-sized bathroom, closes her eyes underneath the lukewarm water and lets him wash her hair with his clever fingers. Tonight, wrapped in his stolen 300-threadcount Egyptian sheets, she turns onto her back and looks at the makeshift ceiling that guards them from the worst of Terminal City. The skylight, which more just a sheet of glass set in concrete, tells her that it's dark out. They have a mission to run tonight, a routine cat burglary.

_Forever_, she thinks, and can't help the bitterness that wells in her mouth, tasting like bile and defeat and anger. She hates that she has given up on Logan. She hates that she has given up on getting rid of the virus, forfeit it to some kind of life where they live terminally two feet apart, wanting. In her image of them like this, his fingers are stretched out, nearly at her face, before he draws them back, and she can almost smell the fear that goes with the motion, the adrenaline that races his heart through its paces.

It has been five months since Jam Pony and Max Guevara knows she never scared him before that. But things are different here and now, trapped in Terminal City struggling to put food on the table; different with Logan, but she should have expected that. Psychologically, that he has withdrawn -- that they have both withdrawn, losing faith in the imaginary unfinished bridge across their chasm -- is inevitable. It should have happened a long time ago, should have happened at Harbor Lights.

Alec finishes showering and comes out to get dressed; when he goes for the door, mutters something about going over the mission with one of the guys. "Stop," she says.

He's annoyed. "What is it? I'm going to be late, which as you might recall you hate about me."

"Shut up. Do you remember what you said to me that first day we met at Manticore?" she asks, sitting up; doesn't bother with modesty. He's seen it, after all, murmured awful dirty things about it half a centimeter from her ear, low and rumbling, immersed in her legs and her belly and her sensitive neck.

"That I was your breeding partner?" he hazards, looking out of place. She rarely asks him questions, prefers to think the worst of him all on her own. She's usually right.

"No, stupid," she snaps. "I mean -- when you said you might catch something, 'cause I'd been living out here in filth and degradation."

"Oh," he says. "That." He grins at her: No hard feelings, right, Maxie?

Jerk. "Yeah," she snaps again, irritated. "That."

"What about it?"

"Did you know then? About the virus?" Her voice hovers on a high note, something unflattering, and he looks surprised -- shocked -- then guilty. It makes him ugly, guilt, creases his forehead and turns his smirking mouth hard and flat, and she can see why he doesn't indulge in the feeling too often. "About what they were going to do?"

"No," he says, and she believes it's the truth. "No, I didn't."

She nods, looks down past her breasts to her hands. "Okay," she says, strangely disappointed that it wasn't intentional cruelty; that she couldn't have stopped it if she'd just thought, just realized exactly what was going to happen, just exercised her goddamn brain once in a while.

"Don't think too much," he advises quietly, and looks at her a long time, her skin gold in the low light, soft against the harsh ancient code on her back, the destiny that couldn't wait to be found, had to make itself known as though written by an invisible hand up and down her spine. "You'll sleep better."

He goes, and she closes her eyes. "I don't sleep," she says to the empty room.


End file.
